It’s Only Common Sense

It’s A Brand Spanking New Year!

Even if you didn’t do your homework in Q4, it’s not too late to set yourself up for a great year. All you need is two days of planning and then a lot of hard work and you will make the year 2020 the best ever.

Here’s what you do:

Review 2019, what worked, what didn’t, and what you have to improve to make next year successful. You don’t want to spend too much time on this, but it’s always good to look at what happened and learn from it, good or bad. Which customers grew, which customers did not? What did you do right? And not?

Current accounts: make a list of your current accounts. Review the business they placed with you last year and when they placed that business, what month? If you don’t have this done already, it will take a little while to get it together. But, the lesson here right out of the gate is to make sure you keep track of this information this year. You need to know at all times where you are with your current accounts. How are you going to know how your doing if you don’t keep score?

How are they going to do this year? Take a look at that list of current accounts and using the G2 you should have been collecting at all times, figure out if they are going to go up or down this year. This will help you to develop your forecast for this 2020. The fact that you have month to month bookings information, will be valuable to calculate the way the business is going to come in this year.

Check out the business or customers you lost during the year: Then figure out how you are going to replace that business. Now is the time to do this, while you have the luxury of twelve big fat months ahead of you do remedy the situation.

Produce account plans for all your current accounts. This should include their total available business of your kind of technology. How much of that business you can win, and what it is going to take to win it?

Develop a list of target accounts. These are the accounts that meet your “Ideal Customer Profile” (which is a profile of the customers that fit your company well). Then develop target account plans for each of them. What are their hot buttons? What is it going to take to win their business? Once you have these account plans done add them to your forecast.

Forecast: Develop a month by month forecast of what you are going to book in the next year. This is critical. No forecast…no success. And don’t tell me that forecasts don’t work because to me that is tantamount to telling me you are a lousy salesperson. Sorry, but that’s the ugly truth. The key to being a great salesperson, actually the key to being great at anything, is to be disciplined and accountable.

Measure your progress: Create a daily matrix to track your progress. This is another critical factor to being successful. You need to know where you are according to your plans for the year, and how you’re doing against forecast at all times. Otherwise, you are going to find yourself floating way off course and it very soon it will be too late to do anything about it; causing you to lose the opportunity of having a great year.

Monthly progress reviews: Do a complete monthly progress review. Not only checking on where you are to date, but what you have to do to stay on track in the next month, the next four weeks

Quarterly Review: Then do a quarterly review as well. You need to be aware at all times where you stand in terms of your annual goals. If this all sounds hard, well it is, but I never said these were easy guidelines, just surefire guidelines.

And one more thing, always under promise and over deliver. Create and implement and follow up plan using these ten guidelines, whether or not your company requires them. A great salesperson should consider that he/she is in business for himself or herself, and thus it’s up to that salesperson to act as if he or she, own their own business. If your company does not require this level of discipline, then you will be the outstanding salesperson on the sales team. And if they do, then you know that you are on the right track and that you are working for a great sales manager, and a great company.

So, take these first days of the year to prepare along these guidelines, follow them diligently, and I can guarantee that you will have a fabulous 2020. And here’s wishing that you do…Happy New Year. It’s only common sense